Lindir wasn't prepared to thank her either!  But then it was called for!

He covers the awkwardness by bending over the forge to add and arrange charcoal.

<Unclean to put your self in a thing?  It is not something you do casually, and I have not done it in long years, but I would not say unclean...>

Lindir listens curiously to her philosophy as he finishes readying to the forge, but frowns toward the end.  <That... sounds somewhat like what Sauron the Deceiver was saying in Eregion, how we should force our will on Middle-Earth.  But it was not impossible; rather the question is whether we ought to... and I would not deny that we should to some extent; am I not here in Middle-Earth?  Those who think otherwise have long since returned to Valinor.  Yet saying it is impossible for the principle you cite to do otherwise... reminds me somewhat of Arisseranta's interpretation of the Valar as being crystalized willpower incapable of change?  Her interpretation has never entirely been disproven, though I have not heard anyone reference it in long years...>

It's not like Fëanor's dead-dead, it only makes sense to talk about him like he's alive because he's still around to kick up a fuss, surely?  Even if he's irretrievably in the Halls...  Ah well.

<Yeah, that was - A humorous turn of phrase, it's not, like, theologically forbidden or anything I just don't like the idea unless I'm literally trying to put my entire soul into something else that better suits me.  Should such a thing exist.  Leaving bits and pieces lying around just seems...  Strange.  ...Even most of the practitioners that have stuff to do with souls in my homeworld, at least the ones that aren't - effectively analogous to Morgoth cultists - would find that - odd.  A soul is meant to be the whole of you.  Though perhaps if it was Spirit...  Hmm.  Have to think about that one, actually.>

<And as far as...  I mean, the thing is that I'm not from here and I don't rightly know if my rules still hold, besides my magic obviously still working to some extent, but - no, the Valar Are, they aren't λ, I should think - even if they're extremely Light-stubborn.>

<The nature of Void is that it is - pure concept, unbound by physicality.  The Valar were made.  They were made real.  I suppose that knocks the question up a level to whether Eru could ever have been other than how he is, in creating this world...  But even so, I don't...  Think...  That that's...>

<How to put this...>

<If Eru Illuvatar was a creature of λ I would be vastly surprised.  To λ-be is to be irreal and yet still exist because you simply cannot care that the Light of reality finds you impossible to reconcile with itself.>

<And yet Eru Illuvatar is all but synonymous with the Song.>

<And not in the way that Cneph advised Harumaph...  But that is another myth besides, and one I am not sure I could retell and tell true to the story as it was told to me.>

<...To force one's will upon Middle-Earth...>

<...Dear gods, didn't that sink a continent?  But the worst part is that to live is somewhat to force one's will upon the world, this I cannot refute ->

<But if anything, Void magic is the exact converse of 'attempting to force your will upon the world', because it is 'inviting into the real world a - reflection of what you seek'.  Being stubborn enough to shift reality into a more desirable shape is more a feat of Light-work than Void.>

<Leaving aside that the Fall of Eregion was more of a shamanic disaster than anything else, paradigmatically, if you put what little I know of it - that it resulted in the loss of a continent from assumedly the world revolting, not the rendering-a-disaster-area of a continent from a force left to run riot - through the lens of my understanding of my magic.  Or, well, maybe the Valar did it, which...  Still isn't not a shamanic disaster, albeit for different reasons...  I vaguely recall that at some point somebody smacked a large landmass into something hostile like the world's most overpowered flyswatter, but that is - stretching the limits of my knowledge.  That might have been Mordor, actually; I don't know.>

Right.  Anyway.  Time for some pyromancy.  Not her favorite field, certainly not her preferred combat magic - she favors, in the terms of a game she isn't playing, Frost and Arcane - but she can handle fire, when something needs to be at melting temperature.  She just needs to have the runes ready to etch once she's cast the template...

<Yes, I am also curious about how your magic's rules still hold for you when... some of them rhyme, perhaps, with the rules of magic we know; but they are far different.>

He grins.  <The verdict would be to try to learn your magic - but that is a project for another day.>

<But... if most anything of what we say about Eru Illuvatar is true, He not synonymous with the Song.  Some people have ventured that He is synonymous with the Secret Fire, which... sounds like it might be the same thing as what you call the Light of Reality... and I do not believe the Valar have said otherwise?  Though some people have also said the Secret Fire was sent to the heart of Arda, which does not necessarily contradict that but would be surprising...>

He cuts himself off when she starts working with the fire; craft before philosophy.  <I can pump the forge?> He gestures to the forge opening, and then the bellows.

<I wouldn't know much about that from your end of things, but I have some suspicions as to whether I might sort of be carrying my magic around with me.>  Being as there is a tap to the Twisting Nether in the heart of her soul, and all.  She paid fiat for that, a mere multiverse accident surely shouldn't break that particular design....  <Goodness knows if it's something I could teach, but I do think it would be quite worthwhile to try, given that the present circumstances involve trying to give Sauron the worst day and any surprises we can spring on him will be very helpful.  ...Though I'm not sure how much we can keep secret from the methods I know he has to spy on things, let alone those I don't.>

<Wouldn't dare speculate on the Secret Fire, though.  I can't say I've any recollection of it, though nor am I truly surprised.>

<...Probably wouldn't help to pump the bellows; the airflow only matters when you're actually burning something, and could be kind of unhelpful when it would be blowing the hot air away...>

<Heat equalizes, but it equalizes more slowly across things that are particularly similar in temperature because there's just less energy to gain, as I understand it.  Though I do suppose I should note that I mostly specialize in cold/ice, and macro-scale kinesis, even if I'm pretty confident in my physics, short of divine intervention.>

Anyway!  She's just going to introduce more thermal/kinetic/Fire energy into the (levitated a safe distance from both of them and also anything that's particularly flammable) metal, until she can start pressing it into the arcane mold!  ...This shouldn't take all that much time, but it's definitely not all that kind to her mana reserves, so she's glad she can do it here, and not in a cave with a box of scraps.

Lindir steps closer in surprise as she's forging the silver entirely by magic, outside of the forge!

<I was assuming you were going to use the natural fire --> He gestures at the forge.  <We... find it easier, using our magic.>

<It probably would be less taxing, to be honest - I have an enchanted forge that has its own fuel reservoir and actual controls in my own workshop, for much the same reason - but while I do know the theory of coal forging, smoke is horrible for people's lungs (and also the environment in general if there's enough of it - that's part of Why Mordor Is Like That, actually, I believe -) - and I can afford to bring this to temperature the hard way since there will be time enough to recover my personal reserves afterwards, before other things start to happen.  That, and doing intensive work like this helps deepen my reserves, or at least improves my fine control - like building muscle or training flexibility, but for magic.>

Now that she's finished with that, she has to actually charge and set the enchantments - and introduce the other forces.

<Now, this is where stuff starts getting kind of crossdisciplinary, and I'm going to have to start asking you to Not Look at some of the things - not yet, I still do need to charge the anchor runes and that's not the part that breaks if someone tries to look at it funny at just the wrong moment, but soon I'll be inserting Voidstuff, which is very much something that gets modulated by perception -- You can look at the Light, though, though now that I'm thinking about that that's a different sort of hazard, sort of, being as how it really wants to unite everything within it...>

Lindir didn't know that about mortals' lungs (and it sounds like a shame), but he can totally understand about improving one's control of artificing magic!

He nods acceptingly, and glances at the Light.  If it doesn't feel too dangerous (especially, too much like Sauron), he'll look further.

...Anyone's lungs, surely!  ...Wait, but...  Now that she's thinking about it she's not sure anymore!  

The Light, once Alicia has carefully fed a spark into the center of her not-megaphone...

It beckons.  It promises.  But it is not misleading about its promise that it can make you one with it and the universe - that you can't really keep being a you if you surrender to its song is...  Evident.

Ah.

It looks interesting.  But nothing more.

He hasn't seen anything much like this before, but it doesn't look like a deceiver like Sauron.  He doesn't think it's dangerous, at least not like this.

<This part is the bit where I'm going to need to ask that you Not Pay Attention to the magic I'm about to do, I'm afraid.  Light's a lot more inexorably shaped-like-itself than Void can ever be.  You can look after I'm done, though.>

Sigh.

<Very well - this is intriguing!>

He stops examining the magic and turns himselfaway.

She knows, Lindir, she wishes she could show you - but the way that unconstrained Voidstuff is inherently shaped by everyone perceiving it is just...  Too risky to countenance.

At least it's not all that difficult, per se - she's already got a firm anticipation of what she's making, to shape the Void she calls up and anchors to the arcane framework.  The Void picks up the vibrations of speech, allows them to pass into it, echoes the λwords it picks up through the internal connection point...  (The Light does its part to make the λwords it picks up real once more, tied to another Void working that imbues the listeners' preferred common tongue that those newly reified λwords ripple through, in superposition until they're heard.  Or λ-heard; it's close enough.)

...Huh, now that that's done, she can test it.

"...You can look now," she says, into the λ-pickup, prepared to osanwë if this isn't working.

Lindir looks.

<Amazing,> he says in osanwe.  <I have not seen anything like that... where are the words' definitions coming from?>

And aloud in Sindarin, "Amazing!"

<Coming or going?>, she osanwës back. <On the input-side, they sort of - it's the disturbance they make as they pass through the initial microphone - well, no, it's hardly a microphone proper, but the audio pickup - but on the way out, it's the λwords interacting with the listeners' perception of a common tongue that collapses them into actual translated sounds.  Goodness, I bet that's going to have Some Interactions with languages that arrange their sentences differently...>

<...What's really neat is that - I wasn't really even expecting this per se, but it seems like the way that sound travels radiatively means that you also get to hear the untranslated words, too.  It should help immensely with learning...>

<...I wonder what it will do for children that don't have language yet - not to mention that now that I'm thinking about it the more sapient animals* could use this too as long as they have something speechlike ->

* To be read to specifically not include, for example, the Eagles, who can already talk in human tongues.

<... interacting with my soul's perceptions of language?  I didn't see how it could be doing anything of that...> He looks closer.

"You wouldn't, not unless it was actively doing that while you were looking, I think?  Can you - feel the magic sort of lapping up against you, like waves on a beach, from how it's carried along with my words..."

...Well, that's going to be an interesting test of how effectively tone and tempo are translated, because accidentally dropping into what she is definitely calling Guided Meditation Voice is...

Somethingy.

... Once he looks around his soul rather than around the artifact, he can see it!  Waves of... something that's closer to Ungoliont's Darkness than anything else he's ever seen before!  As if it's not from Arda itself at all.

He shivers reflexively.

But it's not actually darkening anything.  It doesn't feel as dark or hostile.  It doesn't seem to be affecting his soul at all.

He replies in Sindarin, with quivering voice, "I... I haven't seen anything like this since Ungoliont ate the Two Trees of Valinor.  Maybe that's because it's from beyond Arda?  Or maybe something else?  But... your magic isn't hostile like hers."

"Dammit I told Gandalf I was worried about that and he said it was fine because he didn't sense -- but I wasn't casting so how he thought he could know is really beyond me and I should have known better -"

"...Yeah.  It's not...

"The Void is not Unlight.  It's stranger than that.  Cosmologically speaking, my world's Light is something that itself arose from the Void.  But there's a similarity of sorts in that they're both - at least, as far as my best guess of what the actual fuck Ungoliant even does because I don't know if there was an explanation of how she even existed to begin with in any of the references I could have read, let alone how her powers worked - they're both kind of fundamentally irreal, not things that exist.  Things that didn't-exist before existing was invented."  Which many people consider to have been a very bad move.

"No, I have not heard any more than blind guesses about where Ungoliont came from or how she exists...  I definitely do not see anything like what Ungoliont did.  So if Mithrandir told you it was fine, I would trust him at least for the present."

She nods.  "I'll definitely get a second look, now that I have an actual live example, but - well.  My worries were much more along the lines of 'it would be horribly discourteous to give every Elf who was alive at the time flashbacks to the destruction of the Trees by doing this sort of magic', than over that.  For which flashback I would like to apologize, incidentally."

"...Gives me some wild hopes for plan 'maybe destroy Sauron's own Ring of Power without having to throw it into Mount Doom', though, come to think, because - well, Ungoliant is a much bigger stick than a Maiar.  But even if that doesn't pan out - it might not, it probably won't, I don't think I, myself, have more throw weight than him, but if there's any way I can think of it would really behoove me to try, because the alternative is having to throw it into Mount Doom -

"Well, hopefully it will allow me to veil some things from the Eye's sight, and the Ring's...

"Whatever it has, that lets it attempt to tempt and manipulate."

"Could probably make a Shadowcloth drawstring to replace the entirely nonmagical one Frodo's hiding it in, come to think, though that's another mana-intensive project and while I know the theory of cloth crafts it's not one I've yet had much of an occasion to put into practice...  But there's still some time left."

"...Oh - and, erm, while I'm thinking about it, would you say that the Light I called up for this project was - well, at all similar to the Tree-Light?  I...

"Well.  I don't want to make any promises.  But...

"I think I could sort of...

"Make.

"A lowercase-t tree.

"Into a receptacle for the Light I call on, that will also grow as a Lightwell as the tree grows.  Or possibly a reservoir for Tree-Light, if I can realize it sufficiently...

"It's not exactly a substitute for an Act of Eru or anything, because it would take a lot of magic to make an us-scale tree even remotely approach the Trees' scale.  ...Not that I expect Eru to do much but arrange more tragedies until Dagor Dagorath, but I digress.

"...It's just, I hope that that'd be better than no Trees or etc., for the rest of forever.  If it works.  Which I don't know."